1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to lock management, and more particularly to improving the performance of lock management for locks on shared resources.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Distributed data systems have long used “locking” as a means for ensuring data integrity in a shared resource. At its most fundamental level, locking a resource is a technique used by an application to prevent its use by another application until the locking application is finished with it, this locking technique being termed “exclusive” locking. In large systems, where data sharing and parallel transaction processing is the rule, it becomes increasingly important to insure that locking does not result in unnecessary delay of transactions. In distributed and parallel systems, the various nodes typically rely on message passing for the sharing of information, and the processing overhead associated with these messages for coordinating between large numbers of nodes is significant. Thus, more efficient means of concurrency control are needed.